This op-ed by historian Nicole Hemmer in the NY Times (gift link) is important for the crowd that’s tut-tutting the left for going too far and making the right so mad that they’re creating an authoritarian backlash. She reminds everyone that the left did not invent cancel culture and that the right isn’t reacting to anything — they’ve always been this way. An excerpt:
“It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left — what we often refer to as wokeness — has come for the right,” The Free Press’s Bari Weiss explained in the introduction to a podcast on the subject. And while conservatives are split over whether this is a positive development or a negative one, they all seem to agree on one point: The right learned its vengeance politics from the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” the conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X. Right-wing cancel culture was simply “an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”
That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.
The conservative movement that arose at the start of the Cold War readily married government power and private efforts to crack down on its political opponents. Take the case of Counterattack, the newsletter of an anti-communist organization with the anodyne name of American Business Consultants. Funded by the textile millionaire Alfred Kohlberg, Counterattack began publishing in 1947 with hiring managers in mind, regularly publishing the names of people it believed had communist sympathies.
In 1950, Counterattack published a lengthy pamphlet called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.” The cover featured an outstretched red hand cradling a microphone; the interior contained 151 names of people and a list of their suspected connections to communism. Though pitched as a list of “Red Fascists and their sympathizers,” “Red Channels” targeted people for their involvement with unions, civil liberties groups and Black civil rights activism. Philip Loeb, who lost his role as one of the stars of the TV series “The Goldbergs” because his name appeared in the pamphlet, was included for supporting groups like the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball and the Stop Censorship Committee.
It goes on to detail the McCarthy era and the various right wing repressions that came after. They’ve been doing this a long time. It really is their raisin d’etre.
I thought it was especially relevant considering this new group which I am very glad to see:
On Wednesday, over 550 celebrities relaunched a group first organized during the post-World War II Red Scare: the Committee for the First Amendment. Their intent is to stand up in what they call a “defense of our constitutional rights,” adding: “The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry.”
The current group is headlined by actor and activist Jane Fonda — whose father, actor Henry Fonda, was one of the early members of the first Committee for the First Amendment, which was founded in the 1940s to oppose the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, through which the federal government accused many top entertainers of being communists or communist sympathizers and derailed their careers.
Other members of the newly re-formed committee include filmmakers Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, J.J. Abrams, Patty Jenkins, Aaron Sorkin and Judd Apatow; TV show creator Quinta Brunson; musicians Barbra Streisand, John Legend, Janelle Monáe, Gracie Abrams and Billie Eilish; comedians Tiffany Haddish and Nikki Glaser; as well as actors Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Kerry Washington, Pedro Pascal, Natalie Portman, Viola Davis and Ben Stiller. Another signatory is actor Fran Drescher, who last month ended a term as the president of the SAG-AFTRA union, whose membership includes NPR’s journalists.
It’s past time (looong past time)for the creative community to step up. They’re in the cross hairs. Free speech is everything. But they have platforms and they have money to leave the country if they have to and they owe it to the country to use that privilege and speak up.
Hemmer’s piece importantly notes the fact that in the 1990s when Newt Gingrich and his wrecking crew took power the right cleverly created the concept of “political correctness” (precursor to “woke”) and began to pretend they were free speech warriors merely defending the first amendment. Those of us who’ve been around a while knew better, But it may come as a surprise to read all this by some who either are too young to know about this or willfully ignored it (Chait, cough, Chait) in order to help the right deploy their hypocritical tactics.
This stuff isn’t new and we needed the likes of Henry Fonda back in the 40s and 50s and Norman Lear in the 70s to fight them. It’s never easy to do it because they’ve always been determined to use the power of the state to shut us up. But it can be done if people are willing to step up.